Creature Comforts

Bryant & May were the first British company to utilize animation for advertising purposes. In 1899 animator Arthur Melbourne-Cooper was hired to produce a stop-motion short in which matchstick men move along a ladder and paint an appeal on a wall. This appeal read `For one guinea Messrs Bryant & May will forward a case containing sufficient to supply a box of matches to each man in a battalion with the name of the sender inside.'(www.bfi.co.uk) It is easy to be cynically dismissive of what is obviously a clever, if extremely crude, ad campaign disguised as a patriotic act of charity during the Boer war. However it is not as easy to be as dismissive of the extent to which animation has been adopted from these humble beginnings as a prevailing
It was an incredibly engaging short due to the interaction between fantasy and reality with which it presented the viewer. In his book Understanding Animation Paul Wells describes the relationship between the diegetic narrative and the characters surroundings as fabrication and suggest that it is a narrative strategy. This is to say that ‘fabrication essentially plays out an alternative version of material existence, recalling narrative out of constructed objects and environments, natural forms and substances, and the taken for granted constituent elements of the everyday world.’(Wells, 1998 p90) This means that there is a relationship between the abstract expression of character through the model and the ‘constituent elements of the everyday world,’ which lends itself more towards mimesis. Despite the fact that animation is an abstract form of expression, these ads have a ‘documentary feel’ that lends a voice of authority to their
The ad showed the child being burnt with cigarettes, thrown down stairs and chocked. Humorous sound effects and cartoon clichés along the same style of Tom and Jerry where used. This was a visual and aural aesthetic that the viewers were used to associating with harmless and enjoyable children’s cartoons. However the tension in play between the diegetic aesthetic of the animated child and the mimetic aesthetic of the father and the background environment served to unease, and unsettle to the point of disturbing the viewer. The viewer was left to imagine the results of such violence on a real child and the commercial’s effectiveness at highlighting the concerns of the NSPCC was